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Originally Posted by Severian
I agree to some extent. The first half was horrifying, and it was hard to imagine how they were going amp up that faceless terror factor again.
For me, it clicked when the "Yellow King" imagery returned, and Rust realized (I forget what the context was, but it was after talking to one of the surviving victims) that the "worst of them" was still out there.
And then of course realizing that he'd had a conversation with the dude early on. That was pretty fucked up.
I've seen other references to "Yellow Kings" in horror and fantasy literature. There was actually a book called the Yellow King that came out last year... never read it, but it seems like there's an actual urban legend surrounding that character. If there is, I'm ignorant of it, or too stupid to connect it to the mythical being it's supposed to represent, but I want to learn more about it because it's a powerful and scary fucking image.
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The Yellow King references are to Robert Chambers book, The King in Yellow, but it's a bit of a red herring. It takes the names yellow king and carcosa from the book but that's about it. The real influence was another horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, who's ideas in Conspiracy Against the Human Rust seem to have inspired the philosophical side of the Rust character, to the extent that some people have accused the TD creators of plagiarism.
RUST: "Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law."
LIGOTTI: "We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law."
And so on.